UT baseball: Longhorns win regional

AUSTIN — After being pushed to the losers’ bracket and forced to win three games in a row to survive the first week of the NCAA tournament, Texas beat Kent State 5-0 in the championship game of the Austin regional on Monday.

The Longhorns, the No. 7 overall seed in the tournament, advance to their third consecutive super regional. They will host Arizona State in a best-of-three series at UFCU Disch-Falk Field beginning Friday or Saturday. The winner of the super regional will move on to the College World Series.

In Monday’s game, which was UT’s fifth in four days, the Longhorns used each of the pitchers who had started the first four. Sam Stafford wound up throwing pitches in less than 72 hours. Taylor Jungmann, expected to be selected in the first round of the Major League Baseball draft Monday night, worked an inning two days after throwing 85 pitches on Saturday. And perhaps most incredibly, Cole Green pitched a perfect inning of relief less than 24 hours after throwing 103 pitches against Texas State.